I’ve been getting considerable amounts of email from mac fanatics about yesterday’s piece on the new Apple music store. As a result, I’d like to expand on the subject (as I have to a few people via email today). The problem that I have is not with Apple in particular but with the approach they are taking. At the current time, MP3 is the closest thing there is to a standard for sound on the Internet. To offer something that deviates is no a problem as long as that something is an open standard that can be implemented on other platforms by other people. With the choice of AAC as the new standard, Apple is going the proprietary route and that’s what I disagree with. There are other standards out there that offer better compression than MP3 (Ogg Vorbis, for example, seems to be a good alternative and happens to be an open format. So while Apple is selling the “better compression, smaller size” gospel, its only interest in AAC is that it allows for them to lock things down for now as AAC is only supported in Quicktime and iTunes, two products offered by Apple. Also not touted in…

So Apple launches an online music store. It looks very nice when put side by side with the competition. For starters, there doesn’t seem to be any monthly fee and all tracks are the same price. This seems like a good idea until you start reading the fine print… according to Apple, the tracks you download are high-quality AAC music files. AAC files? what are those? A quick search on the Apple site reveals that AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding and that’s a format that works on well, it works on the mac and on the iPod. If you want to carry that anywhere else, you can’t. OK, well, I’m a programmer and that’s a new sound format, maybe I can write a decoder. So where’s the format. Oh, here it is. What, I have to pay to read the standard? What if I wanted to develop a free decoder? Oh, right, I would have to pay for that too! Oh well, back to my regular MP3 collection then. At least I can use it either on my PC, mac, and existing MP3 player. I don’t have to be locked into a particular OS, use a particular player or…